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Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#101

Post by scarface74 »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #55
cddotdotslash wrote: post #10

Back when I was working on everything myself, I deployed everything through AWS Lambda and API Gateway, with all my static assets on S3 and CloudFront. I had exactly zero infrastructure issues over the course of two years and never dealt with security patches, SSH'ing, etc. If I were doing billions of requests, it may not have been the most cost effective, but it helped me scale without worrying about typical devops…

Did you ever have any problems with the function concurrency limit?

It’s a soft limit. You can request a larger limit and get it increased within 30 minutes.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#102

Post by [deleted] »

tbyehl wrote: post #65
jedieaston wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious, how much did you have to pay for your licenses? If you are a single founder with a new startup, it seems like you’d need a bunch of money to be able to use Microsoft in production, unless you can use something like BizSpark (if that’s still a thing?).

BizSpark is not still a thing. The replacement program, Microsoft for Startups, requires being associated with a partnered "startup-enabling organization."

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#103

Post by robocat »

jedieaston wrote: post #52
jasonkester wrote: post #36

I build my stuff on top of a stack that hardly ever goes down. All my SaaS products run on a Windows server, with SQL Server as a database and ASP.NET on IIS running the public sites. You can probably come up with a lot of uncharitable things to say about those technologies, but "flimsy" and "fragile" likely aren't in the list. As a result, when things go seriously wrong, the application pool will recycle itself and…

I’m curious, how much did you have to pay for your licenses? If you are a single founder with a new startup, it seems like you’d need a bunch of money to be able to use Microsoft in production, unless you can use something like BizSpark (if that’s still a thing?).

If using Microsoft be very wary of the cost of understanding the licencing - especially for the "free" options.

Many years ago we used BizSpark, and we wasted far too many days and dollars trying to understand and use the licencing (and using the abysmal web interface that was mandatory). We couldn't end up jumping through the right hoops to use products in production, even though were target audience for the products when we started our business. The licences had very broad exceptions that gave Microsoft the right to pull the plug at any time.

I'm sure things are different now, but I'm also sure they are the same.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#104

Post by aspectmin »

aspectmin wrote: post #76

FWIW - if you just want to make sure your services are up - consider: 1) pagerduty.com or uptimerobot.com for remote monitoring to make sure you site(s) are up (and get alerts when they're not). 2) Datadog or New Relic if you want deeper monitoring (application performance, database performance, diagnostics/debugging. 3) Rollbar.com (site doesn't seem to respond) for site performance/errors. 4) Roll your own with Pro…

FYI - if you would like some help setting up any of these - drop me a note (email in profile) - happy to advise, most of this is pretty easy.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#105

Post by mikece »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #93

I know this is going to be down-voted to nonexistence since everyone now-a-days wants to serverless, AWS and what not. personally i've always used either hosting.com or inmotionhosting.com. yes they are more expensive than AWS and what not, but the thing is, they both have a support staff 24/7/365. I called whenever i need and have someone remote into my server and fix whatever is wrong. furthermore, i can even have…

I don't see why this would be considered something to downvote. You're essentially hiring an outsourced I/T staff by going with a service like this which is probably something that can be leveraged a very long way and will remain cheaper than bringing on full-time staff or engaging contracted I/T consulting.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#106

Post by [deleted] »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #93

I know this is going to be down-voted to nonexistence since everyone now-a-days wants to serverless, AWS and what not. personally i've always used either hosting.com or inmotionhosting.com. yes they are more expensive than AWS and what not, but the thing is, they both have a support staff 24/7/365. I called whenever i need and have someone remote into my server and fix whatever is wrong. furthermore, i can even have…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#107

Post by SkyPuncher »

I used AWS Cloudwatch and some simple server side checks (ianheggie/health_check for Rails is great) for a very long time.

It's not perfect, but it's (1) cheap (2) easy (3) quick (the mythical trifecta). It misses some of issues due to high loads (but still technically available) but works perfectly when things actually crash (like queue workers deciding to turn off).

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#108

Post by gumby »

Sounds like there is a business opportunity here. A kind of DevOps-AAS, though to make it scale you'd probably need the customer to probably architect their system in a certain way.

(though this is essentially a single-line comment, it's earnest, not intended to be sarcastic)

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#109

Post by tnolet »

jmstfv wrote: post #78

I am a solo founder of a website monitoring SaaS [0]. Theoretically, my uptime should be higher than that of my customers'. Here are a few things that I found helpful in the course of running my business: * Redundancy. If you process background jobs, have multiple workers listening on the same queues (preferably in different regions or availability zones). Run multiple web servers and put them behind a load balancer.…

This is is scary.

This is exactly how I run my (also monitoring) SaaS and it shows that the OP has learned how to minimize risk and prepare for the worst.

You are married to your mobile & laptop.

I also shows there is no free lunch: you need to invest in redundancy.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#110

Post by apankrat »

> I was able to sign in to the AWS console and resolve the issue

Kids these days.

I had a RAM stick fry in one of the physical machines sitting in a colo 1 hour drive away. Not die, but just start flipping bits here and there, triggering most bizarre alerts you can imagine. On the night of December 24th. Now, that was fun.

--- To add ---

If you are a single founder - expect downtime and expect it to be stressful. Inhale, exhale, fix it, explain, apologize and then make changes to try and prevent it from happening again. Little by little, weak points will get fortified or eliminated and the risk of "incidents" will go down. There's no silver bullet, but with experience things become easier and less scary.

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